Fair Game

...He appears to have a vision of the radicals of Miss Hellman's stripe as being a much better breed than the cold war liberals—less ideological, more civil and highly responsible...

...I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion...

...But even if Wills seems to be less reasoned than he has been on other occasions and Miss Hellman seems no more candid than she has been, on the critical issue I find myself pretty much in agreement with them...

...Elia Kazan served up to the Congressmen a stale list of his old friends in the party, and went on to take out a paid advertisement attesting to his patriotism...

...The record of those "radicals" is stained by dishonesty, by ignorance and by a rhetoric of freedom that concealed absolute subservience to Stalin's Russia...

...Our domestic Communists were never a threat to this country...

...In particular, those who clicked their tongues over Senator McCarthy's tactics while approving of his intentions were giving way to just the sort of easy evasions that served our fellow travelers when confronted with Stalin's tactics—which, one wishes Miss Hellman might recall, were rather less pleasant than those of the Senator...

...Garry Wills, a good writer who lately seems to be in peril of diminishing into a hit man for the New York Review of Books, is here quite carried away by his own formulations...

...I have not kept up with this ongoing autobiography, and Scoundrel Time did not excite any desire in me to rush out and get hold of the other books...

...Every one of the repeated Congressional investigations into show business was ludicrous...

...I was raised in an old-fashioned American tradition and there were certain homely things that were taught to me: to tell the truth, not to bear false witness, not to harm my neighbor, to be loyal to my country...

...Of more particular interest is the way the author and Garry Wills, who contributes an angry Introduction to Scoundrel Time, reconstruct the postwar years and the responsibility they place on the liberal intelligentsia of that era for first fueling the nation's anti-Communism into a sort of mania, and then failing to come to the defense of people whose lives were being damaged by Congressional inquisitors...

...Edward G. Robinson, whose estimable career had ground to a near halt since his listing in the Right-wing vigilante publication, Red Channels, was grateful that the committee had exposed the Communists who had been imposing upon him for all those years...

...She told the committee: "I am not willing, now or in the future, to bring bad trouble to people who, in my past association with them, were completely innocent of any talk or any action that was disloyal or subversive...

...For a long time she behaved like a character out of that old joke?the person who, when somebody asks why the Moscow subways don't run on time, turns the conversation to the condition of blacks in the South...

...Her memory, unfortunately, is incomplete...

...It is a self-celebrating piece of work, by a skilled writer who knows that the best way to persuade readers of one's honesty and right-thinkingness is to concede that one has made passing "mistakes," and the best way to sell one's courage is to make much of one's weaknesses...

...The damage they did was not to the security of the nation but to the liberal cause (or, if Wills prefers, the cause of American radicalism...

...He turns psychohistory into psychohys-teria...

...FAIR Game BY WALTER GOODMAN 'Scoundrel Time' In May 1952, Lillian Hellman appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, then enjoying one of its periodic excursions into show business...

...Jose Ferrer, up for an Academy Award, asked that Congress or the Justice Department establish a warning service to keep simpletons like him out of trouble...

...To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable...

...But the letter also contained a few of the most memorable lines Miss Hellman ever wrote...

...By this account, the precursors of Joe McCarthy were those liberals who turned against the Russians the ideology and the emotions that had spurred their fight against Fascism...

...The important point, however, is that the great majority of those called before Congressional bodies had done nothing illegal, and most of the investigations were carried out for parochial, vengeful and frivolous motives...

...Though liberals were not the worst scoundrels of Miss Hellman's Scoundrel Time, the unhappy truth is that they were not the heroes that liberal principles could have made them...

...Lillian Hellman was not accused by the committee of being a Communist, only of hobnobbing with them...

...No doubt such radicals exist, and we must wish them long lives, but can Wills really be referring to the party members and hangers on who were behind the Wallace campaign, the Waldorf conference and other benefit performances in behalf of the most repressive regime extant at the time...

...The letter had a heavy share of puffery, designed, one supposes, to touch the better instincts of the Congressmen present, or at least of the reporters: "I do not like subversion or disloyalty in any form...

...She had lived for some years with Dashiell Hammett, who had been a party member in the '30s and had spent time in prison as a result of his refusal to cooperate with a Congressional committee...

...Fellow Traveling As for Miss Hellman, she tells us that she is not a political person —and we may take her at her word...

...But Wills' treatment here is so heated and so hurried, so bent on making a case and so neglectful about what the Russians were in fact up to in Europe during this period, that the Acheson-type planners come off as fanatics, not to say madmen...

...Having celebrities grovel before an arm of the legislature was always exhilarating, and the committee staff may have hoped that by picking yet again on Hollywood, it might recapture some of the glory of 1947, the year of the Hollywood Ten...

...There is, I think, a great deal to the argument that the 1947 publication by the Truman Administration of the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations contained the seeds of the harrass-ment of unpopular opinions that liberals would later deplore...

...Now she concedes that she made some "mistakes" about Communists, but she is benignly understanding about and forgiving toward herself and others who made her sort of mistakes, saving her abuse for the liberal intellectuals who did not come forcefully enough to her defense...

...Hollywood always held for the smalltown boys from the South and the Middle West who ran the committee, the same sort of fascination it had for their constituents back home...

...Wills, following the path marked out by a number of revisionist historians, connects the domestic attacks on Communists with the campaign of post-World War II cold warriors to build support for their foreign policy...

...John Garfield took care to notify the committee that he had once received an unfavorable review from the Daily Worker...

...At her hearing, Miss Hellman took the Fifth Amendment, but not before she placed in the record a letter in which she volunteered to testify about herself if the committee would promise not to ask her about other people...

...Most of them, understandably, chose to appear foolish...

...By 1952, an effective blacklist had already been established by the band of weak-kneed tough guys who controlled the major studios, and it was difficult for witnesses whose careers were at stake to emerge from the committee rooms with much style...

...She had also participated in Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential campaign and a number of other front activities, notably the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria in the spring of 1949, the Old Left's last bash or gasp before the cold war settled in...

...Louis Post Dispatch, as well as by such television personalities as Edward R. Murrow...

...Moreover, the appearance of a big-name actor or writer or director was a guarantee of newspaper coverage at a time when Senator Joseph McCarthy's "investigations" were taking the play away from his friends in the House...

...In every case, the instigation was trivial, the process was unwholesome and the consequences for witnesses were painful...

...These words and the event that occasioned them form the centerpiece of Scoundrel Time (Little, Brown, 155 pp., $7.95), a book that fits somewhere into Miss Hellman's previous accounts of her life—An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento...

...Show business personalities who had given of their money and their fame over the years to causes sponsored by Communists could not stand up to the committee without jeopardizing their professional lives, yet in order to cooperate they had to make themselves out to have been perfect fools...

...The liberal response, never quite so demented as Wills would have us believe or so wholly craven as Miss Hellman prefers to report, did lack gumption...

...As evidence of their negligence, she points to the record of magazines such as Partisan Review and Commentary...

...Although none of these defects can justify the persecution that some of them endured, Wills' recollections are nonetheless peculiar...

...During the whole existence of the Un-American Activities Committee, the nation's foremost liberal weeklies, such as the New Republic, never faltered in opposition...

...Once they became Stalin's creatures, they betrayed their own best ideals...

...When Senator McCarthy came along, he was repeatedly opposed by editorials in such papers as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the St...

...And what was he doing reading the Daily Worker, one Congressman wanted to know...